Courtesy of Pam Martens.
George Clooney in Scene from Money Monster Movie
As Presidential candidate and Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, stumps around the country telling tens of thousands of plundered Americans that Wall Street’s business model is fraud, Hollywood is amplifying that message to millions of moviegoers this year with a series of films that roll back the curtain on how Wall Street has morphed into a crime syndicate.
Wall Street is accustomed to having its legions of high-paid lobbyists and sycophants at the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal doing the heavy lifting in its serial campaign to recast the financial crash in 2008 and its attendant economic implosion as something other than outright fraud. Even when new, serial, diabolical frauds sprang up post-crisis, like JPMorgan’s London Whale, or the cartel rigging of the interest rate benchmark Libor, and the multi-bank foreign currency conspiracy, the lie repeated a thousand times was that it was just a handful of miscreants sprinkled about Wall Street causing the problems.
Indicative of the boys’ club attitude was the outrageous editorial that ran at the Wall Street Journal on October 20, 2013 titled “The Morgan Shakedown.” The unsigned editorial stated that “The tentative $13 billion settlement that the Justice Department appears to be extracting from J.P. Morgan Chase needs to be understood as a watershed moment in American capitalism. Federal law enforcers are confiscating roughly half of a company’s annual earnings for no other reason than because they can and because they want to appease their left-wing populist allies.”
The watershed moment was actually this: JPMorgan’s insured bank had used its depositors’ money to make wild gambles in derivatives in London and lost at least $6.2 billion on those gambles. Subsequent events proceeded to make this Wall Street Journal editorial even further dislodged from rational thought. JPMorgan was subsequently given a deferred prosecution agreement for facilitating the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme (it was his banker for his business account where billions of dollars were laundered as it looked the other way) and, as of May 20, 2015, it is now an admitted felon for engaging in foreign currency rigging. Those charges came on the heels of three solid years of charges against the bank and settlements for everything from rigging electric markets to fleecing veterans.
And JPMorgan had plenty of company with other mega banks on Wall Street joining the crime spree.
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